Chapter 6 Beyond ‘great white men’: teaching histories of science, empire and heritage through collections

In the past few decades, the history of eighteenth-century science and medicine has been transformed. These linked fields of research have, since their inception, been overwhelmingly concerned with the glorification of ‘great men’, those seen to exist within a canon of intellectual giants and public-minded individuals who forever altered the ways in which we understand our world. Revealing their dogged and supposedly selfless pursuit of enlightened progress was believed by eighteenth-, nineteenth- and many twentieth-century historians to provide a helpful model for Western society and, through aggressive colonisation and imperialist projects, the rest of the world. This has been the essence of such scholarship from the early modern period onwards.¹

Recently, however, there has been a deliberate move away from studying scientific individuals and their ideas as if they were lone scholars in a study – a philosophical image that has cast a long shadow – and more towards what Nicholas Jardine calls the ‘hybrids of scientific knowledge and practice bound up in the worlds of everyday life, culture and politics’.² Questions of agency, materiality and epistemology now help scholars explore how various forms of scientific and medical knowledge permeated eighteenth-century life, from urban shops and kitchen gardens to high society and the high seas. It is increasingly clear that objects and skills crossed complex geographical, cultural, material and experiential boundaries, even as the limits of who and what constituted ‘science’ became more severely drawn across the centuries. Research in this area now interrogates meanings of connoisseurship, invention, appropriation, exploitation, exchange, marketing and mimicry, among much else.

A critical part of this revised approach to the study of scientific and medical knowledge has been the exploration of the many ways in which it was collected in the early modern period and subsequently transformed into ‘modern’ physical taxonomies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The history of collecting as a discipline in its own right was established in 1983 as the result of a conference held in the world’s first ‘public’ museum, The Ashmolean in Oxford. This event, and all the work and discussions surrounding it, ultimately kick-started three decades of conversations uniting curators, academics, artists and engagement professionals on how best to explore the tangled histories of collections.³ Collections of all kinds – from large national institutions and universities to private cabinets and the semi-public ones of voluntary societies – ceased to be seen as neutral spaces of learning or leisure or the benign results of an individual collector’s idiosyncrasies. Instead, they began to be understood as valuable repositories of a diverse array of histories, revealing the labours not only of those who had the wealth or power to create them in the first place but also all those whose contributions of knowledge, labour and material, both voluntary and forced, actually constituted them. Exploration of these have reinforced how closely tied histories of collecting are to imperialism, slavery and exploitation, as the lives and remains of non-white individuals were harvested to construct the hierarchies of Enlightenment science and philosophy.⁴

With all this valuable historical work, the question remains: how can we best present such contentious histories within both museum spaces and classrooms? A response to both aspects of this question can be found in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, which was opened within a recreation of George III’s library in 2003. It evokes both the early modern ‘Cabinet of Curiosity’ and the eighteenth-century encyclopaedic worldview, disrupting assumptions around modern museum conventions by breaking down material and intellectual boundaries and highlighting the pre-disciplinary jumble of strange, mundane and ‘exotic’ objects. It is deliberately designed to encourage visitor conversation and is regularly used by students and teachers across London and beyond. Visitor enjoyment of this space is supported by frequent guided tours and object-handling sessions which remind students that the modern museum-going experience of ‘look-but-do-not-touch’ is actually not how things have always been. The gallery is an example of how historical objects and collections can be used to disrupt assumptions regarding the transfer of information from state ‘knowers’ to public ‘learners’ and encourage reflection on both embodied experience and institutional representation, past and present.⁵

Such interventions have links with the ‘material turn’ of historical scholarship and subsequent popularity of incorporating objects into higher education teaching. This also relates to the current vogue for representations of the early modern Cabinet not only in museums but also across the broader art world.⁶ However, such approaches have prompted intense debate in wider museological, educational and philosophical scholarship. In a museum context, for example, the category of ‘Curious’ is understood by some as sanitising, potentially working to purify violent histories of colonialisation and exploitation by removing curatorial responsibility from objects amassed by seemingly ‘amateur’ eighteenth-century collectors and naturalists. In the classroom, critics similarly worry over the potential promotion of singular, extraordinary objects, partial stories and set hierarchies of expertise or experience conditioned by the kinds of materials that tend to survive. There is a worry that these methodologies seduce by spectacle, and do not adequately support students in interrogating issues of power and control within the structures of appropriation and display that continue to draw a profit from these collections.⁷

Yet these issues are the ones that are at the heart of current research into the history of science and medicine in the eighteenth century and have, in essence, been debated in various ways since the formation of the earliest collections of natural knowledge. Engaging students with these discussions helps them to understand that Western scientific knowledge, despite historic claims by its supporters, was never created in controlled settings separate from society or without the efforts of a vast array of individuals and peoples from around the globe. It also speaks to urgent contemporary debates on the public understanding and institutional representation of this period of European expansion, exploitation and institutionalisation.

The reflections here are the result of many years of research and teaching in the history of early modern science and medicine and the history of collections but are specifically focused on the experience of teaching a first-year undergraduate course at the University of Chester in 2018–19, entitled ‘Collecting Nature: From Cabinets of Curiosity to the 21st Century Digital Display’. While this is just one story, and necessarily skewed towards my own research interest, this account is intended to be useful for thinking about how we, as teachers of the eighteenth century, grapple with the material, institutional, intellectual and cultural difficulties of our period of study and its heritage. It argues that the answer ultimately rests in how we can get students to engage with what Alice Procter has called ‘the dirt beneath the surface, where the money and power came from, and how these objects came to be chosen [for display] over others’.⁸

This course was first proposed by a permanent academic at the university who was subsequently awarded research leave and needed quick cover for their teaching. I then designed and delivered the course as a very precarious, ‘post-postdoc’ academic. I was undertaking a short-term, reimbursable research fellowship in one city and administrative work at a university in another, alongside a host of additional forms of employment. It ran for one year, and then both I and the permanent academic moved on to other institutions, and it was unfortunately not run again. This information is included as part of this chapter’s broader motivation to encourage focused attention on the practical, material and social contexts of research and learning throughout history. Deeper exploration is urgently required of all the ways in which academic (and student) precarity is affecting research and teaching in UK academia, often deepening existing structural inequalities. As the University and Colleges Union have repeatedly stated in successive strikes since 2018, backed up with a growing body of contemporary data and research: working conditions are learning conditions.⁹ In this case, the students on the course were disappointed they were not able to continue developing their interests in these subjects beyond the first year.

Objects across time and space

As this chapter demonstrates, there is a great deal of value in being able to draw students into the long history of collections as pedagogic ‘contact zones’ – spaces of cultural interaction and negotiation, of both intellectual inspiration and social subjugation, where expertise might be constructed but also, crucially, endlessly contested.¹⁰ Going beyond the singular object or Cabinet to teach the broad-ranging histories as well as local practices of Western collecting and display helps ground students in the inherent subjectivity of knowledge-making and learning at all levels of society and activity. In so doing, this pedagogical approach encourages the active exploration of the eighteenth century’s complex contemporary legacies in a dynamic, inclusive and fundamentally self-reflexive way. Throughout the course in question, lectures and seminars explored the historical trajectory of objects and collections-based learning from early modern natural historical inquiry to nineteenth-century public education – essentially, from the Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosity to the ‘encyclopaedic’ collection and panoramic worldview of the modern world, as well as revisionist and postmodern contemporary criticism involving collections and their histories. This overarching temporal and thematic framework was designed to give students a foundation for understanding how social, economic and political contexts shaped scientific and social knowledge in the past, and allow them to interrogate this further in more dynamic, task-orientated sessions.¹¹

Towards the end of the first term, students were asked as a group to use this knowledge to design their own three-room exhibition on early British histories of collecting and collections. They were given twenty-five examples of historical objects and images with varying amounts of accompanying information, including Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia engraving of a flea; Edward Tyson’s pygmy skeleton; a narwhal horn in the collection of Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna; Mary Delany’s ‘Nymphaea Alba’ collage; and Josiah Wedgwood’s Cauliflower-ware teapot, as well as a whole host of other curiosities, prints and material (medical and otherwise) that could potential provide a way into the history of collections. Students were asked to conduct research on these items as a group and then select around ten to fifteen for inclusion in their exhibition, according to the narrative that they had designed together. The exhibition the students constructed saw the visitor travel through displays on natural and artificial ‘rarities’, through to objects of empirical investigation and attempts to systematise and popularise science and, finally, broader cross-cultural collecting and commerce. The students’ exhibition prompted discussion about curatorial choice and audience, as well as what objects and stories are excluded from both historical record and museum narratives.

In another session, we discussed Neil MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 documentary, A History of the World in 100 Objects, and listened together to the episode about the Hawaiian chieftain’s feather helmet or mahiole seemingly obtained by Captain James Cook on his third voyage (1776–80). This is a significant object in the history of exploration and empire, given as a valuable gift from the Hawaiians as an apparent token of esteem only a few weeks before Cook was killed in his attempt to kidnap the ruling chief of the island, Kalaniʻōpuʻu-a-Kaiamamao, in a failed negotiation tactic. MacGregor discusses the value and sacred nature of the materials used in the helmet, and the ways in which materials and meanings may have been translated between the Hawaiians and the Europeans, as well as the significance of the object’s historical and contemporary political resonance. While the object discussed by MacGregor is housed in the British Museum, and one of several collected on the voyage, the original feather helmet placed on Cook’s head by Kalaniʻōpuʻu was given to the Dominion Museum in Wellington, New Zealand by Baron St Oswald in 1912. It was subsequently bestowed via long-term loan from the Bernice Pauahai Bishop Museum to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, demonstrating the power of reconnecting objects of empire with their source communities.¹²

With this awareness of how an object might become transgressive in multiple ways by its movements into and out of collections, the students were then asked to devise similar presentations for assessment on museum objects discovered via engagement with museum websites. They were prompted to detail their original cultural and material values, the processes of their acquisition or display, and their changing meanings as they moved across different spheres of activity. One group, for example, chose The British Museum’s platypus holotype with the missing skull. They explained its cultural significance for Aboriginal Australians, as well as how difficult it was for Europeans to categorise the animal: it was only accepted by the Western world as evidence of a real animal in 1799, when the British Museum’s keeper of natural history, George Shaw, scientifically described it. The students also reflected on the creature’s symbolic role in post-Second World War international relations. Another group chose the ubiquitous ‘Feejeean mermaid’ – another touchstone in histories of collecting and global exchange – and used it to explore the commercial dimension of collection-making and -showing, from seventeenth-century merchants and coffeehouse-men to ‘the greatest showman’ and subject of a recent popular film, P. T. Barnum. They also highlighted the prevalence of mermaid myths around the globe, and how monetarily and intellectually profitable it might be to engage with such symbolic histories. In this way, students were encouraged to think about cultural and temporal relativity and resonance when approaching both objects and collections, and they spontaneously situated these within their own ideas and experience.

Individual, local, national, global

Moving from the ideological and practical underpinnings of the collection, transportation and display of individual objects, the course then shifted its examination to the historical and political trajectories of different kinds of collections. Students were encouraged to think about how different collection histories reflect varying attitudes towards science, public education, region and nation, and have been deployed by different groups for different purposes throughout history. This shift was supported through physical visits to multiple collections where students were assisted in identifying and decoding each museum’s organisation and architecture and encouraged to think further about the historiographical debates on empire, knowledge and power we had covered in class. Founded in 1839 as the UK’s first teacher training college, the University of Chester does not possess its own collection – the highly varied and often unequal relationship between university heritage and resources and access to social and cultural capital will be addressed later on in this chapter – so instead we visited the city’s Grosvenor Museum. The focus of this session was the relationship between museum collections and their geographical and social contexts.

Many smaller civic museums were founded with the collections gathered by local amateur societies and clubs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This means they often represent regional landscape, history and culture in a much more direct way than the collections found in large national museums (often established with the collections of one or more individual rich patrons). Not only that, but they also have different funding streams and relationships with their audiences as well as surrounding institutions of higher education. Learning about and exploring these aspects of the collection helps situate students within their specific localities of learning, and provides an overarching framework for understanding the relationship between the individual and the collective on the one hand, and local and national on the other. This is also something that might be usefully explored with regard to contemporary questions of crowdsourcing engagement activities by museums and, more broadly, the practice of ‘citizen science’ over time, both dynamic areas of current research.¹³

The changing relationships between museums and peoples was a key theme in this course. At the World Museum Liverpool, the class discussed the city’s history as one of a number of wealthy ports built with the profits made through Britain’s undeniable and significant involvement with the slave trade. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Liverpool scooped up the spoils of empire and pumped them into the industrial revolution, the influx of money and power contributing to distinctively rapid urban, social and intellectual development in this city, alongside many others, including Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol. This well-known history is deeply entwined with that of the development of public science and collections in the UK. As one example, the important Manchester surgeon, collector and hospital-builder Charles White was said by his contemporary Thomas De Quincey to have ‘by one whole generation run before the phrenologists and craniologists – having already measured innumerable skulls among the omnigenous seafaring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the races of men’ (see Figure 6.1).¹⁴ White was an early architect of biological racism.

**Figure 6.1:** Fold-out from Charles White, *An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables* (London: Dilly, 1799). Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark.

Like many other northern industrial cities, Liverpool was hit hard with aggressive deindustrialisation by successive Conservative governments from the 1970s onwards, with the resulting devastation at odds with its former imperial splendour. This chequered history is evidenced in William Brown Street: named after the nineteenth-century MP and philanthropist who donated the land for the building of a public library and museum, it has recently been transformed by targeted regional renewal schemes, and has specifically benefited from Heritage Lottery funding. Liverpool has become a definitive example of ‘culture-led regeneration’ policies, where investments into infrastructure and creative economies deliberately combined with targeted public learning, community and arts engagement programmes have essentially transformed the city, its museums and its people. The opening of the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in 2007 is perhaps symbolic of this entwined urban and social history. Beginning life in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots of 1981 as a dedicated gallery space in the Merseyside Maritime Museum in 1994, the ISM has shifted from permanent display to permanent institution through activist projects and working with Liverpool’s Black community. The ISM has, under the directorship of Dr Richard Benjamin, led proactive discussions of research and exhibition co-production, community partnership work and institutional articulations of the legacies of slavery and imperialism.¹⁵

Students were excited by their ability to actively link a museum’s past and recent history to its contemporary role in local and national society, which they were able to divine from displays. So, for example, at the World Museum Liverpool, many of its African collections are displayed alongside a series of contemporary ‘counterpoint’ lino prints by Ghanian artist Atta Kwami, reframing and reworking sketches of some of the artefacts: the Royal Liver Building alongside a similarly shaped African comb, for example, or shapes taken from the Liverpool Docks alongside bright patterns reminiscent of Kente cloth. Students were encouraged to think whether and in what circumstances the inclusion of such artwork should be considered a form of celebration and representation, or a means to augment and, indeed, neutralise and essentially excuse the colonial African materials on display there. One student even connected this back to an earlier seminar on William and John Hunter’s collections, the relationship between eighteenth-century science and art (William Hunter was the first professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts), and the linked investigations into the human body and the question of enlightened aesthetics.

More broadly, the students responded extremely well to the ties between historical themes and contemporary debates or social initiatives. Many of the most fruitful discussions were on diverse issues of inclusivity, representation and engagement. These were all, without exception, driven by the students themselves as they reflected upon syllabus topics using their own knowledge and critical reading of various forms of news media. So, for example, a session on early modern fossil-collecting and the careers of Mary Anning and Gideon Mantell, both important figures in the history of science but barred from formal inclusion and recognition, led to a debate on contemporary barriers to education, funding and advancement for both female and working-class scholars. Another session was on ‘Living Bodies to Objects of Scrutiny’ and involved the Hunters and their role in the development of collections-based surgical teaching and museum collections. Discussion here focused on the Charles Byrne and Sarah Baartman campaigns to remove their bodies from display, the broader impact of the Human Tissue Act of 2004 on museum ethics and repatriation efforts, and the growing field of disability history, something which excited the students very much.¹⁶ Throughout the course, eighteenth-century issues and topics were demonstrated as linking directly to a variety of important and interesting contemporary cultural, political and ethical discussions, and the relevancy of the period was undeniable.

Breaking down barriers

Teaching in this way invites students to explore and reflect on all the many ways in which tenets of Western science, medicine and society have been constructed and expressed through museums over time, and how this is a key part of understanding broader economic, political and cultural systems and their entwined histories: colonialism and imperialism; slavery and racism; misogyny; class discrimination and working-class education; human zoos, freakshows and spectacles; state-sponsored genocide and the hoarding of human remains; the destruction of the environment; and so on. In doing so, it makes them alert to broader discussions of cultural management and curatorial responsibility in how these histories are either engaged with or ignored: ultimately, how hierarchies of power have been constructed in science and society, and the range of alternative perspectives which interact with them. This kind of teaching encourages critical examination of all outward-facing aspects of collection management and education: accessibility and diversity campaigns, art installations and radical re-readings, public education programmes co-produced with local or source communities, or otherwise created and then presented by the institution in question. Illuminating instances of apparent failure and the reception of criticism alongside more successful ventures, and encouraging conversation about the process, help make it clear that collections are not passive and neutral but active and contested sites, which can – but do not always – allow for the questioning of authority and the sharing of many different forms of expertise. They open up the conversation for students to respond emotionally, on their own terms and with their own prior knowledge, and then to reflect on their reactions, building critical self-awareness and an understanding of many different perspectives in the world around them, while simultaneously honing their ability to analyse and respond effectively to them.

This approach also encourages a greater understanding of the ecosystems of history, heritage and education, the societal forces that unite and divide, the links and the lacks. By exploring such histories, the students are situated within an ever-evolving relationships between museum collections, institutions of higher education and the various publics that engage with them. This reveals how contingent knowledge-making is and always has been; how access to and understanding of collections are subject to issues of geography, funding, audience, policy and politics, community action, and so on. Ultimately, this makes the structures of the world more visible and breaks down some of the real and imagined barriers between institutions of higher education and the world around them, as well as within ‘The Academy’ itself.¹⁷ It provides explanations as to why some universities have their own museums while others do not, why some towns may have a thriving cultural sector and others do not, why some students appear to have access to greater social capital than others. In this way, intersecting inequalities can be identified and understood, and not merely accepted and thus perpetuated, unthinkingly and ad nauseam.¹⁸

The impact of this can be measured not only in abstract but also practical terms. For example, towards the end of our course, we travelled to the University of Manchester and were given a tour of the buildings and their histories by a Manchester Museum volunteer, Jemma Houghton, who at that time was also a PhD student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Jemma was able to provide an overview of some active curatorial projects and collaborations and facilitate an encounter with the collections she supported, including pedagogical plaster plant models, wet specimens and nineteenth-century microscope slides. In doing this, she provided a direct example of how university hierarchies and structures can be broken down to give undergraduate students a greater sense of academic community and ownership, as well as a broader awareness of local collections (whether human, material or manuscript) and possibilities for their own future and development. At the end of this day, two of the students asked Jemma about volunteering opportunities at the museum (see Figure 6.2).

**Figure 6.2:** Photograph of Manchester Museum Collections encounter. Image credit: Alice Marples.

The individual, social and academic benefits of activities which help build this more holistic experience of research and play a role in personal and professional development are becoming increasingly apparent. There is a growing body of research on the importance of academic work which explores the creation and representation of university heritage, in whatever form that takes.¹⁹ It also reflects broader trends within the Higher Education and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museum) sectors and the increasing emphasis placed by funding bodies on promoting the movement of knowledge and the transfer of skills across institutions and conceptions of research. The value of this is perhaps exemplified by the success of collaborative doctoral schemes (such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, launched in 2012) and the impact that these former students are having on the structures of historical research and teaching across diverse spaces, highlighting the many opportunities and challenges involved in collaborative research. Teaching the history of collecting in science, medicine and heritage in this way, then, actively places this kind of work in a long view from the early modern period to the present day. This encourages an appreciation of the history of research-driven education, in and of itself. It reinforces an awareness that knowledge has always been a composite of different interests, networks, influences and materials, made up of both formal and non-formal elements across a range of private and public spaces. It also demonstrates how this history has been represented in different ways to tell certain stories about self, society and nation, while excluding others, and asks how this might change in the future.

As well as complementing recent changes in how heritage and academic institutions engage with both their publics and their own workforces, this approach also suits the highly heterogeneous and blended way that most young people learn while directly imparting and promoting the information and digital literacy skills required to navigate contemporary society.²⁰ It encourages critical engagement with a variety of mediated sources both online and in real life. Sessions held in the IT Lab at Chester that focused on analysing museum websites, online exhibitions and even catalogue platforms were a (slightly surprising) success.²¹ Prompting students to explore and articulate the potential objectives behind the participatory strategies of universities and museums, both online and offline, supports the understanding of them as active parts of society. Examining how these institutions engage with local communities and current affairs, and how this shapes their representation, helps demonstrate that learning and styles of learning are not just handed down but constantly being debated, experimented with and altered in response to the times. Similarly, getting students to reflect on their own pedagogical experiences – how they themselves respond to certain campaigns, certain articles, certain objects or displays – allows them to better articulate their needs and advocate for themselves and their ideas, better enabling them to deconstruct the world around them.

Conclusion

At a time when the colonial and imperial legacies of all institutions – museums and universities included – are under intense and extremely vital scrutiny, collections provide a rich ground for the kind of connective research and teaching required to engage students in the study of the eighteenth century.²² This chapter has made the case that this approach should be a component of all history teaching, from the first year onwards, and not left to the third year, to separate public history modules or to MA studies. As Jim Bennett and many others have said, museums and other scientific collections are never neutral: and it is because of this that they are useful not only as objects of study but also as living resources for reflexive knowledge creation and communication across academic, curatorial and public interests.²³

Notes

1 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Has the Social History of Medicine Come of Age?’, The Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 437–49; Nick Jardine, ‘Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science’, History of Science, 41 (2003), 125–40; Anna Maerker, ‘Hagiography and Biography: Narratives of “Great Men of Science”’, in Anna Maerker, Simon Sleight and Adam Sutcliffe (eds), History, Memory and Public Life (London: Routledge, 2018).
2 Nicholas Jardine, ‘Reflections on the Preservation of Recent Scientific Heritage in Dispersed University Collections’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44 (2013), 737.
3 Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (eds), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Jim Bennett, ‘Museums and the History of Science: Practitioner’s Postscript’, Isis, 96 (2005), 602–8; Rebekah Higgitt, ‘Challenging Tropes: Genius, Heroic Invention, and the Longitude Problem in the Museum’, Isis, 108 (2017), 371–80.
4 Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (London: Harvard University Press, 2004); Kathleen S. Murphy, ‘Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 70.4 (2013), 637–70; Alice Marples and Victoria R. M. Pickering, ‘Patron’s Revies: Exploring Cultures of Collecting in the Early Modern World’, Archives of Natural History, 43.1 (2016), 1–20; Paul Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
5 Kim Sloan and Andrew Burnett (eds), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: British Museum, 2003); Constance Classen, ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, Journal of Social History, 40.4 (2007), 895–914; Carin Jacobs et al., ‘Beyond the Field Trip: Museum Literacy and Higher Education’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 24.1 (2009), 5–27; Helen Rees Leahy, Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing (London: Routledge, 2016).
6 Bruce Robertson and Mark Meadow, ‘Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge’, AI & Society, 14 (2000), 223–9; Colleen J. Sheehy (ed.), Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006); Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge, 2017); Ulf Johansson Dahre, ‘The Return of the Cabinet of Curiosity’, in Magdalena Naum and Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson (eds), Collecting Curiosities: Eighteenth-Century Museum Stobæanum and the Development of Ethnographic Collections in the Nineteenth Century (Lund: Lund University Press, 2020); Ethan W. Lasser, ‘The Return of the Wunderkammer: Material Culture in the Museum’, in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds), Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
7 Helen J. Chatterjee and Leonie Hannan (eds), Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education (London: Routledge, 2016); Suninn Yun, ‘Curiosity, Wonder and Museum Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52 (2018), 465–82; Sarah Williamson, ‘Exploration: Cabinets of Curiosities – Playing with Artefacts in Professional Teacher Education’, in Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi (eds), The Power of Play in Higher Education: Creativity in Tertiary Learning (Cham: Springer, 2019), pp. 103–11.
8 Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk about It (London: Octopus Publishing Group, 2020).
9 Lindsey B. Carfagna, ‘The Pedagogy of Precarity: Labouring to Learn in the New Economy’ (PhD thesis: Boston College, 2017); Olivia Mason and Nick Megoran, ‘Precarity and Dehumanisation in Higher Education’, Learning and Teaching, 14.1 (2021), 35–9; Sarah Burton and Benjamin Bowman, ‘The Academic Precariat: Understanding Life and Labour in the Neoliberal Academy’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43.4 (2022), 497–512; Jason Arday, ‘ “More to prove and more to lose”: Race, Racism, and Precarious Employment in Higher Education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43.4 (2022), 513–33.
10 Ramesh Srinivasan, Katherine M. Becvar, Robin Boast and Jim Enote, ‘Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Museum’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 35 (2010), 735–68; Darlene Clover and Kathy Sanford, ‘Contemporary Museums as Pedagogic Contact Zones: Potentials of Critical Cultural Adult Education’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 48 (2016), 127–41.
11 Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Objects and the Museum’, Isis, 96 (2005), 559–71; Ad Maas, ‘The Storyteller and the Altar: Museum Boerhaave and Its Objects’, in Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau and Helmuth Trischler (eds), The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2010).
12 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: Allen Lane, 2010); Sean Mallon et al., ‘The ‘Ahu ‘Ula and Mahiole of Kalaniʻōpuʻu: A Journey of Chiefly Adornments’, Tuhinga: Records of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 28 (2017), 4–24.
13 David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Charles W. J. Withers and Diarmid A. Finnegan, ‘Natural History Societies, Fieldwork and Local Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science’, Cultural Geographies, 10 (2003), 334–53; Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Owning and Collecting Natural Objects in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Marco Beretta (ed.), From Private to Public: Natural Collections and Museums (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2005); Robert E. Kohler, ‘Finders, Keepers: Collecting Sciences and Collecting Practice’, History of Science, 45 (2007), 428–54; Sue Dale Turnbull and Annette Scheersoi (eds), Natural History Dioramas: History, Construction and Educational Role (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
14 Peter J. Kitson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr White and Mr De Quincey: Manchester, Medicine and Romantic Theories of Biological Racism’, Romanticism, 17 (2011), 279; Alice Marples, ‘Scholarship, Skill and Community; Collections and the Creation of “Provincial” Medical Education in Manchester, 1750–1850’, Journal of the History of Collections, 33 (2021), 505–16.
15 Richard Meegan, ‘Urban Regeneration, Politics and Social Cohesion: The Liverpool Case’, in Ronaldo Munck (ed.), Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003); Richard Benjamin, ‘The Development of the International Slavery Museum’, African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, 10 (2007), 1–6; Bernadette T. Lynch and Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Legacies of Prejudice: Racism, Co-Production and Radical Trust in the Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 25 (2010), 12–35; Richard Benjamin, ‘Museums and Sensitive Histories: The International Slavery Museum’, in Ana Lucia Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2012); Lucia Abbamonte, ‘Black Stories Matter: Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum and Multimodal Representations of a Controversial Heritage’, ESP Across Cultures, 17 (2020); Christopher Lawson, ‘Making Sense of the Ruins: The Historiography of Deindustrialisation and Its Continued Relevance in Neoliberal Times’, History Compass, 18 (2020), 1–14.
16 Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”’, History of Science, 42 (2004), 233–57; Richard Sandell, Annie Delin, Jocelyn Dodd and Jackie Gay, ‘In the Shadow of the Freakshow: The Impact of Freakshow Tradition on the Display and Understanding of Disability History in Museums’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 25 (2005); Elizabeth White, ‘Giving Up the Dead? The Impact and Effectiveness of the Human Tissue Act and the Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in English Museums’ (PhD thesis: Newcastle University, 2011); Thomas L. Muinzer, ‘A Grave Situation: An Examination of the Legal Issues Raised By the Life and Death of Charles Byrne, the “Irish Giant”’, International Journal of Cultural Property, 20 (2013), 23–48; Roberta Ballestriero, ‘The Science and Ethics Concerning the Legacy of Human Remains and Historical Collections: The Gordon Museum of Pathology in London’, Scientiae in the History of Medicine, 4 (2021), 135–49.
17 Meliha Handzic and Daniela Carlucci (eds), Knowledge Management, Arts, and Humanities: Interdisciplinary Approaches and the Benefits of Collaboration (Cham: Springer, 2019).
18 Roy Nash, ‘Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11 (1990), 431–47; Imogen Tyler, ‘Classificatory Struggles: Class, Culture and Inequality in Neoliberal Times’, The Sociological Review, 63 (2015), 493–511; Tom Schuller, John Preton, Cathie Hammond, Angela Brassett-Grundy and John Bynner, The Benefits of Learning: The Impact of Education on Health, Family Life and Social Capital (London: Routledge, 2004); Brenda Little, ‘The Student Experience and the Impact of Social Capital’, in Ian McNay (ed.), Beyond Mass Higher Education: Building on Experience (Milton Keynes: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 2006).
19 Zenobia Kozak, ‘Promoting the Past, Preserving the Future: British University Heritage Collections and Identity Marketing’ (PhD thesis: University of St Andrews, 2007); P. J. Boylan, ‘European Cooperation in the Protection and Promotion of University Heritage’, Les partenariats actifs des musées universitaires (2003), 30; Marta C. Lourenco, ‘Contributions to the History of University Museums and Collections in Europe’, Museologia, 3 (2003), 17–26.
20 James W. Marcum, ‘Rethinking Information Literacy’, The Library Quarterly, 72 (2002), 1–26; Susie Andretta, Alison Pope and Geoff Walton, ‘Information Literacy Education in the UK: Reflections on Perspectives and Practical Approaches of Curricular Integration’, Communications in Information Literacy, 2 (2008), 5; Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson, ‘Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy’, College & Research Libraries, 72 (2011), 62–78.
21 D. Randy Garrison and Heather Kanuka, ‘Blended Learning: Uncovering Its Transformative Potential in Higher Education’, Internet and Higher Education, 7 (2004), 95–105.
22 Kerry Pimblott, ‘Decolonising the University: The Origins and Meaning of a Movement’, The Political Quarterly, 91 (2019), 210–16.
23 Bennett, ‘Museums and the History of Science: Practitioner’s Postscript’, 602–8.

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Chapter 7 Teaching eighteenth-century classical reception through university museum collections

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